As the hotfixes start to roll in there is a concerning trend of dumbing down and making the game easier as opposed to quality of life improvements and bug fixes. Continuing down this path will ruin your vision and diminish what distinguished this game from the likes of Diablo and PoE.
Please stop for a moment and don’t let the review bombing and petulant few change the course of your game development into one of mediocrity. The people who want instant gratification are the same people who will stop playing after 30 hours claiming they’ve done it all. And once the game that easy, you won’t have a hardcore players base sticking around either, and the game will die.
The Breach had it’s issues but did not deserve the reaction it received from people who did not want to learn the system, invest time and were downright bad at the game. So came the hotfixes and now the game is just way too easy. You can now stunlock enemies and break ranged enemies targeting you again, in the cave in tutorial zone when you are running under the effect of Iona’s bloom and 3 ranged enemies are supposed to shoot you while walking on the hallucinated bridge, they just barely even notice you.
Making the game easy is not the way, it will change the reviews temporarily at the cost of losing your hardcore base. Please reconsider future changes.
I may be in the minority here, and I suppose the response to this thread will be a good scale to judge. I just hope this game doesn’t get derailed because of review bombing kids who chose to wage war against developers that don’t give them an easy game to beat in 20 hours and move onto the next.
Ah. Yeah I mean people can just not consume food if they wanna save it and learn the fight that way. Repair cost and very reasonable/negotiable now. Tbh if you’re gonna outright copy souls like combat you’re inevitably going to collect estis flask enjoyers who don’t understand why you didn’t copy that mechanic as well…
IMO rune imbalance and the new camera do more damage than anything to the games combat integrity.
The enemy AI gives souls vibes as well, the flash acks when you have 3 slow walking enemies come towards you and the effective clearing strategy is run lighting and “pull/group” mobs is a joke compared to us before the patch having more 1on1 combat even in multiple enemy situations. They seemed to stagger engage more before, idk.
About 80hrs in between the early release and breach i enjoy the game a lot.
The game is not easy but i really like the difficulty. There is a big satisfaction in overcoming the challenges.
That being said I would really love them to add attack animation cancel. I am not sure if i recall correctly but i think the early access did have animation cancel. It is especially brutal when it comes to two handed weapons and throw skills since the wind up is so long for two handed attacks and you have to wait for your weapon to return before being able to move for throw skills.
Roll out from being surrounded by mobs should be an option too. Example like the Iona cave, it is so easy to be swarmed by the light monsters and if you don’t kill them soon enough you are surrounded/ locked in and beaten to death.
Also, i noticed is that in the breach patch there are many spots my character often gets stuck in. Rolling and sprinting does not help get out but doing a charged attack seems to do the trick.
So far they have only managed to weaken the enemies and give broken ranged spell to staff like the ice staff while ignoring the most important fixes we needed like the one you mentioned being animation canceling.
theres a difference between making a game less difficult and dumbing it down
hotfix2 stun kind of made moveset variety obsolete against normal enemies.
the moveset of weapons dont matter when the base attacks do the trick for most things.
you dont need runes.
you dont need sprint or roll attacks.
you dont need to block with a shield.
i am completely fine with the overworld being accessible, but only if it retains the cool stuff that makes the combat feel so memorable.
as of this hotfix, it doesn’t.
needs a huge amount of work
I mean… Do we need to go back in time and watch Echo get 1 shot with lighting assault. Or the ice staff slam? I forget the damn name.
Game has always been like this and will be until maybe the combat update I take it? I was hoping some balance would make its way in breach but every time I bring it up people just say combat update.
Moon straight up copied souls combat but gave us 4 weapon arts. IMO souls isn’t even a good combat game and yes I’ll die on that hill. Some of the bosses have good fights but if a fucking fish and beat the game with random inputs we also can’t act like it’s the gold standard.
I think the enemies being spammy like they are now makes the combat more fun but that multi enemy interactions should be toned down to give better flow to the fights. No different than why you don’t have 5 enemy fights in Monster Hunter. There is a flow to each battle that additional enemies would collapse.
IMO that’s where the problem is, the number of enemies, not their strengths. If you had less enemies you could buff them to introduce real mechanics in the fights.
The amount of people saying “oh just kite them into a group and use lightning attacks” should tell you how terrible the combat state is currently. That’s not the game I put 500 hours in, that’s not Wicked.
Meanwhile I’m playing a pure physical fist build with leg sweep that enemies attack me through, turnback kick which is amazing but obviously needs correct timing in a multiple enemy situation and flying kick for some AOE and chaining with autos. I cleared the woods boss pre nerf with the camera target big n all just out of pure spite and hate. The fight didn’t feel hard it just felt stupid. A lot of rune attacks just feel bad, and others are OP. Auto attacks are ok when you find a weapon you like.
If the tune the multi enemy fights without turning them into auto walking dark souls zombies I think they’d e ina great spot.
Stop destroying the game already! You turn her into The Sims. As soon as the game was released before the Breach update, it was very difficult at the beginning, but each time it got easier for me, I studied the bosses, the world and equipment more and more, my skill and skill grew. As a result, the long-awaited victory over Echo Knight became the culmination. It was hard, but it was real. Why are you trying to make a game of for weaklings? Go around the world, upgrade your skill and you will be happy!
Oh also… If we’re serious about ideas to make the games combat better look no further than fighting games. Give different mechanics like flinch (hit micro stun) so we can combo, give us juggling (aerial attacks), give us knockdown attacks, give us standing stuns, and give enemies and players a meter break mechanism so everything doesn’t just get hit stunned down without fighting back, etc. ATM we only have poise because that’s all souls had xD it’s a straight copy but with parry on every weapon (which is an improvement admittedly)
The road map for great combat has and always will be fighting games. I was addicted to BDO for years because it scratched the itch of a fighting game but I could play with friends and it had big team fights.
I watched several videos of negative reviews, and one common thing I found with their gameplay is that: They are not actively seeking attack windows. They don’t catch enemy wind ups, don’t attack when they see a wind down, and panic roll away from attacks instead of diagonal rolling into the enemies.
Those symptoms gave a strong “I played souls games before, but not the NG+” feeling. You know, the type of player who holds up a shield and square dance with a lothric knight for minutes until their stamina runs out.
So I would suggest this game in some ways offer some better training for the newer players.
Remember Hanbei, the Undying (死なず半兵衛) from Sekiro? Yeah maybe what we need is that guy, a seperate training mode that have no consumable requirements, does not punish player for dying, and offers training, as well as a testing ground for the player.
You can listen to these people detached from reality and realize all it will do is lead back to Mostly Negative reviews on Steam, or you can make the game accessible for the large majority of players who would like to play it.
They don’t care about how your game does commercially. All they care is about feeling superior to the unwashed masses they deem beneath them; that’s why they play, for bragging rights and to feel important and better than other people. Their satisfaction comes at the cost of your commercially viable product.
The beautiful story and art you have poured into this game will be confined to a small niche of players.
